posted by mynym at 11:48 AM
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In the case of biological systems, the parameters are physical processes and the laws that govern them. It is not possible to rule out the possibility of a “intelligent designer,” but the argument from analogy cannot sustain the belief that there is, either.
If one were to land on another planet and find it full of robotic-like technology which had the apparent purpose of self-replication, resource gathering, etc. then the statement “This planet is full of technology.” would be more of a basic aspect of pattern recognition and detection than an “analogy” or pattern comparison. Of course we typically recognize technology based on our own experience but that doesn’t necessarily mean that recognizing technology must always be rooted in analogies to our own. In fact, many of the technologies observed in biology may have no analogy* in our own yet, typically mankind’s technology lags behind and follows from technology already in use. The microscopes and telescopes by which science/knowledge progresses are designed with lenses which imitate the human eye while the simple fact is that such lenses couldn’t be designed in the absence of vast amounts of biological technology already in use and so on.
*E.g.
One of the accomplishments of living systems which is, of course, quite without any analogy in the field of our own technology is their capacity for self-duplication. With the dawn of the age of computers and automation after the Second World War, the theoretical possibility of constructing self-replicating automata was considered seriously by mathematicians and engineers. Von Neumann discussed the problem at great length in his famous book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, but the practical difficulties of converting the dream into reality have proved too daunting. As Von Neumann pointed out, the construction of any sort of self-replicating automaton would neces sitate the solution to three fundamental problems: that of storing information; that of duplicating information; and that of designing an automatic factory which could be programmed from the infor mation store to construct all the other components of the machine as well as duplicating itself. The solution to all three problems is found in living things and their elucidation has been one of the triumphs of modern biology.
So efficient is the mechanism of information storage and so elegant the mechanism of duplication of this remarkable molecule that it is hard to escape the feeling that the DNA molecule may be the one and only perfect solution to the twin problems of information storage and duplication for self-replicating automata.
The solution to the problem of the automatic factory lies in the ribosome. Basically, the ribosome is a collection of some fifty or so large molecules, mainly proteins, which fit tightly together. Altogether the ribosome consists of a highly organized structure of more than one million atoms which can synthesise any protein that it is instructed to make by the DNA, including the particular proteins which compromise its own structure — so the ribosome can construct itself!
The protein synthetic apparatus is also, however, the solution to an even deeper problem than that of self-replication. Proteins can be designed to perform structural, logical, and catalytic functions. For instance, they form the impervious materials of the skin, the contractile elements of muscles, the transparent substance of the lens of the eye: and, because of their practically unlimited potential, almost any conceivable biochemical object can be ultimately constructed using these remarkable molecules as basic structural and functional units. The choice of the protein synthetic apparatus as the solution to the problem of the automatic factory has deep implications. Not only does it represent a solution to one of the problems of designing a self- duplicating machine but it also represents a solution to an even deeper problem, that of constructing a universal automaton. The protein synthetic apparatus cannot only replicate itself but, in addition, if given the correct information, it can also construct any other biochemical machine, however great its complexity, just so long as its basic functional units are comprised of proteins, which, because of the near infinite number of uses to which they can be put, gives it almost limitless potential.
It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that ever existed on Earth, from a giant redwood to the human brain, can construct all its own components in a matter of minutes and weigh less than 10^16 grams. It is of the order of several thousand million million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man.
(Evolution: A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton :337-338)
In any event, the argument would only work if the analogy can be sustained between genetic and other intracellular mechanisms on the one hand and human-contrived codes and machines on the other. But it is far from clear to me how far this analogy can be pressed.
I don’t agree that it’s analogy, instead I would argue that human technology is reliant on and is only a pale imitation of technology which can be recognized as already in use in Nature.
Perhaps we describe the molecules as being “codes” and “machines” simply because those are systems with which we are more familiar?
Or perhaps we describe them that way because that’s what they are. We’re along way from Darwin’s ideas of blobs of goo/”protoplasm” and so on. The irony of the hubris typical to us is that if a person designed a flying machine based on nano-technology which was half as efficient and elegant as that already in use in actual flies then such a structure would be looked at as one of the wonders of the world. Yet flies already exist, so why is it that human technology is a wonder of the world but technology already in use isn’t?
*E.g.
How do insects fly and hover? Initially it might seem that the aerodynamics involved would work against flight. For instance, how is it possible for a bumblebee to fly given that its wings are too small to support the lift required by its weight? Moreover, insects, unlike airplanes, continually flap their wings—and this is hard to square with theoretical calculations. Michael Dickinson points out that fruit flies, which know nothing of aerodynamics, nevertheless utilize vortex production, delayed stall, rotational circulation and wake capture as they effortlessly stay aloft while flapping their wings about 200 times a second.
(The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God, by Roy Abraham Varghese :103-106)
Note that the notion of flying isn’t drawn from “analogies” to mankind’s technology or knowledge of flight, it already existed as a fact of Life for millenia and we’re only just now getting around to imitating and understanding some aspects of it. If anything mankind’s technology is analogous to the technology already in use in Nature, not the other way around.
I have to admit, I do find it amazing that, considered one way, we’re basically just apes that figured out to talk and make fire, and considered another way, we produced the magnificent works of Plato… works through which the human spirit does somehow touch something transcendent.
You are still adhering to “nothing but” reasoning there. I may do it myself sometimes, it seems to be more tempting for men given its hidden disdain for immanence and the way that the human mind “naturally” seems to associate immanence with the feminine for many reasons. There are exceptions but women don’t seem to tend towards that type of reasoning as much.
But anyway, why is it that “just” and “nothing but” seems to emerge when talking about the physical substrate of existence/immanence? For one thing it’s wrong anyway but there’s also little reason to think of immanent things as if they are “nothing but.” If a physicist says that we’re “nothing but” matter then they had best look a little deeper into the nature of matter. If a biologist says that we’re “nothing but” apes then they had best look a little deeper into the biological structure of apes. And so on. Biologists have a bad habit in this area, perhaps when biologists design a machine that can run on some plants and animal products, has teleological principles written into it which shape its being, self-reproduces in ways that approach an infinite diversity while maintaining typological unity which also sometimes apparently sings and dances in joy, writes Mozart, etc., then maybe they can engage in “nothing but” reasoning. But until they do they clearly don’t have some supposedly all encompassing knowledge to back up their ignorant and stupid “All there is to this, is this!” statements about immanent things.
posted by mynym at 11:35 AM
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...even if every single Christian in the world accepted Darwinism, we would still want to know which non-inteligent force is able to generate coded information like DNA. The wind? The rain? The waves in the sea?Secondly, it is not complexity alone that makes the design inference more acurrate. It’s complexity and specificity.
Darwinists must tell the world what natural force is able to generate complex and specified mechanisms.
If there isn’t any, then what becomes of Darwinism?
posted by mynym at 7:26 AM
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Black swans aside. I vigorously protest the idea that mammals descended from reptiles.
That idea is crude and even ridiculous assumption-based Darwinist hype and story telling.
It’s almost as bad as the “water breathers deciding to get out and live” on land stories. (??? a strange idea if ever there was one)
Of course the first fish that tried would die within minutes. So would all the others.
So how did that happen?
Di they evolve air breathing systems while still in the water? Think about how dumb that is for a second.
And why would creatures perfectly adapted to water ‘decide’ to get out and take a walk? Thus miraculously developing limbs as they kept trying!?
Try it yourself. Go ‘back to the sea’ (like whales and dolphins supposedly did!)
Just how many generations of humans drowning would it take before one succeeded? The answer is infinite, because none would ever succeed at all without the appropriate morphological mutations occurring before hand! This isn’t hard.
Darwinist fairy tales (frogs to princes - there’s no real difference, the mechanism is the same - it’s called MAGIC) aside where is reason in these bozo the clown scenarios?
The problems are stupendous.
And as always such tales of biological magic can’t be proven.
You have to demonstrate the possibility with a viable sequence of RM + NS steps and then show how it actually did work.
The whole concept is based on enormous assumptions and the number of required functional morphings involved from cell to fish to reptile to mammal is astronomically high.
And no one has the slightest idea of how such drastic changes could have occurred undirected. Gradualism sucks.
Thus the whole idea is not merely astronomically unlikely but just plain old dumb to the nth power.
posted by mynym at 6:49 AM
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posted by mynym at 6:49 AM
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What deserves to be well known, but has in fact been virtually forgotten, is this: that if Darwinism once furnished a justification, retrospective or prospective, for the crimes of capitalists or National Socialists, it performed the same office to an even greater extent, between about 1880 and 1920, for the crimes, already committed or still to be committed, of Marxists. It is in fact scarcely possible to exaggerate the extent to which Marxist thought in the period incorporated Darwinism as an essential component. Marxists do not believe, of course, that there will be any struggle for life among human beings in the future classless society. But it was that Darwinian conception which Marxists at this time adopted as their description of human life under capitalism.
The reader can easily verify this statement, by opening any Marxist book, pamphlet, or newspaper of that period...(Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove: 106-107)
It will perhaps be said, in defense of Darwinism, that many and enormous crimes have been committed in the name of every large and influential body of ideas bearing on human life. Whether that is true or not, I do not know. But even if it is, there are great and obvious differences, among such bodies of ideas, in how easily and naturally they amount to incitement to the commission of crimes. Confucianism, for example, or Buddhism does not appear to incite their adherents to crime easily or often. National Socialism, by contrast, and likewise Marxism, do easily and naturally hold out such incitements to their adherents...
It is impossible to deny that, in this respect, Darwinism has a closer affinity to National Socialism or Marxism than with Confucianism or Buddhism. Darwin told the world that a "struggle for life," a "struggle for existence," a "battle for life" is always going on among the members of every species. Although this proposition was at the time novel and surprising, an immense number of people accepted it. Now, will any rational person believe that accepting this proposition would have no effect, or only randomly varying effects, on people's attitudes towards their own conspecifics? No. Will any rational person believe that accepting this novel proposition would tend to improve people's attitudes towards their conspecifics--for example, would tend to make them less selfish, or less inclined to domineering behavrio, than they had been before they accepted it? No.(Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove :108-109)
posted by mynym at 9:30 AM
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There are three ways in which a large increase in condom use could fail to affect disease transmission.(The Lancet; 355 (9201): 400-403
First, condom promotion appeals more strongly to risk-averse individuals who contribute little to epidemic transmission. Second, increased condom use will increase the number of transmissions that result from condom failure. Third, there is a risk-compensation mechanism: increased condom use could reflect decisions of individuals to switch from inherently safer strategies of partner selection or fewer
partners to the riskier strategy of developing or maintaining higher rates of partner change plus reliance on condoms. A Canadian study cited by Wilden (Wilde GJS. Target Risk. PDE Publications, 1994.) showed that televised AIDS messages from the Ontario Ministry of Health made respondents more inclined to use condoms and less inclined to avoid casual sexual partners. A US study showed that women taught to negotiate condom use with their partners had no change in incidence of sexually transmitted disease compared with controls, with a trend to an increase in such diseases.
(Cohen DA, Dent C, MacKinnon D, Hahn G. Condoms
for men, not women: results of brief promotion
programs. Sex Transm Dis 1991; 19: 245-51)
A vigorous condom-promotion policy could increase rather than decrease unprotected sexual exposure, if it has the unintended effect of encouraging greater sexual activity (figure 3)[Not available]. The figure shows the potential effects of increasing condom use among soldiers posted overseas for 6 months, when the condom failure rate is 10%. Data are derived from the work of Hopperus-Buma and colleagues,
(Hopperus-Buma AP, Veltink RL, van Ameijden EJ, Tendeloo CH, Coutinho RA.
Sexual behaviour and sexually transmitted diseases in Dutch marines and naval personnel on a United Nations Mission in Cambodia.
Genotourin Med 1995; 71: 172-75)
and use the equation: total number of acts of unprotected sexual intercourse=total
number of all acts of sexual intercourse (1minus c)doplus(cxf) , where f is the proportion of acts in which the condom fails, and c is the proportion of acts in which a condom is used. Point A shows that if sexual intercourse takes place on a mean of two occasions per soldier, there will be 1100 acts of unprotected sex per 1000 soldiers if condom use is 50%. Point B shows a fall in unprotected sex of 33% to 740 acts, which could be achieved by increasing condom use from 50% to 70%. Point C shows that if, as a result of condom promotion and availability, the mean number of episodes of sexual intercourse per soldier increased from two to three, the benefit of increasing condom use from 50% to 70% would be lost. Point D shows that a doubling of acts of sexual intercourse (from two to four) would lead to a substantial (35%) increase in the amount of unprotected sex if condom use is increased to 70%. Point E shows that condom uptake would need to increase to at least 81% to bring the level of unprotected sex back to baseline. Points Aprime to Eprime relate to a baseline situation of 10% condom use. In this case, to reduce
the total number of unprotected sexual acts, condom use must increase to at least 44% if the total number of acts increases by 50%, and to at least 61% if the total number of acts doubles. .... These findings can be generalised.
There is evidence to show behavioural adaptation in response to other interventions that may affect HIV transmission. Two studies have reported that gay men are less worried about HIV infection since treatments have improved, and that they are significantly more likely to report unprotected sexual exposure than in the past. Kalichmann reported that of 327 men surveyed at a Gay Pride festival in Atlanta in 1997, eight (3%) had already used antiretroviral post-exposure prophylaxis and 85 (26%) intended to do so if the occasion arose. Otten and colleagues showed that rates of prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases doubled in a group of patients who had a negative HIV test and counselling for prevention. Early studies on the likelihood of HIV transmission through oral sex suggested(Ib.)
that transmission by this route was insignificant, which led to widespread advocacy of oral sex as a safer alternative to anal sex for gay men. Since then
there has been a steady increase in the number of transmissions attributed to oral sex, which has led epidemiologists to revise upwards their estimates of the likelihood of transmission from oral intercourse.
In an interesting theoretical paper Blower and McLeann have argued that a suboptimal HIV vaccine might increase transmission if lowered risk perception in the target population led to increased risk behaviour.
posted by mynym at 3:45 PM
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Sometimes, scientists who declare a taboo will insist that only they are qualified to discuss and reach conclusions on the matters that they have made their own property; that only they are privy to the immense body of knowledge and subtlety of argument necessary fully to understand the complexities of the subject and to reach the ‘right’ conclusion. Outsiders, on the other hand, (especially non-scientists) are ill-informed, unable to think rationally or analytically, prone to mystical or crank ideas and are not privy to subtleties of analysis and inflections of argument that insiders have devoted long painful years to acquiring.
Yet the history of science abounds with examples that contradict this kind of elitist thinking: amateurs or non-scientists like the Wrights, Edison and even Charles Darwin; and outsiders like John Dalton (the self-taught meteorologist who revolutionised chemistry) and Fleischmann and Pons, the chemists who ‘rescued’ fusion physics.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the taboo reaction is that it tends to have a cumulative and permanent discriminatory effect: any idea that is ideologically suspect or counter to the current paradigm is permanently dismissed, and the very fact of its rejection forms the basis of its rejection on all future occasions. It is a little like the court of appeal rejecting the convicted man’s plea of innocence on the grounds that he must be guilty, or why else is he in jail? And why else did the police arrest him in the first place? This ‘erring on the side of caution’ means that in the long term the intellectual Devil’s Island where convicted concepts are sent becomes more and more crowded with taboo ideas, all denied to us, and with no possibility of reprieve.
How exactly do the guardians of the temple of knowledge impose their taboo? On the face of it, even the suggestion is implausible. Surely scientists, however prejudiced some individuals may happen to be, lack a mechanism to impose their world view on others in any systematic way? In practice, it is the easiest thing iii the world for those who manage the profession of science to declare a subject taboo. For any young scientist to progress in the profession, or even to be employed in science at all, he or she has to conduct research (or to teach what has already been learned from research to students). But to conduct research, the scientist must receive funds from some institu tion or organisation and getting such funds means placing proposals before a number of scientific colleagues who will evaluate them and decide whether or not to recommend that the financial and other necessary resources should be used in this way.
At this stage, the research scientist may be persuasive enough to secure funding or the institution enlightened enough to grant the resources, even for research which apparently flies in the face of orthodox scientific belief (although this happens less and less often today). But the researcher will then encounter the next obstacle which is usually insuperable. To continue to receive funds, he or she must publish their initial findings. A paper has to be submitted to one of a few professional journals where it will be reviewed by distinguished senior scientists from the field. Nominally, these reviewers are the researcher’s scientific peers. In reality they are likely to be academically superior. Even if not senior in rank they are superior in at least one important respect: they decide who gets published and who doesn’t. If they believe the research to be without merit (regardless of the results obtained) they will block its publication. And unless the researcher can get some findings published, he or she will find it impossible to get the grant renewed. Unless there are very unusual extenuating circumstances, non-publication is taken in science to mean experimental failure.
[...]
The net effect of this peer review system is that, at any given time, almost the entire research effort of the country is directed into subjects that are tacitly approved by those who comprise editorial review committees of the scientific press. Those review committees are, in turn, frequently drawn from among the more conservative scientists in the community and the system is self-perpetuating from supervisor to postgraduate to undergraduate. For this reason, virtually the only scientific research being conducted anywhere in Britain into taboo subjects is privately funded and is usually carried on in ‘skunk works’ — private laboratories with little or no resources — and its results are privately published usually in short-run paperback or photocopied editions that do not receive general circulation, or reach major libraries.
posted by mynym at 7:47 PM
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I'll put some links here to other blogs that I've commented on.
Into Good and Evil (parent blog) Red State Law From the Left: Left2Right Culture Wars
Proponents of Darwinian reasoning use the term “selection” so often that for some it seems to be a way of attributing intelligent choice to inanimate matter. It’s interesting that those who believe in things coming about by “chance” often use language implies intelligence. It seems to me that using such language allows a mind that cannot really think itself the result of random chaos and chance to rest on bits of intelligence which it argues actually do not exist. Note that they don’t really need to refer to label rather simple processes of culling, screening and filtering “selection.” Darwin himself noted that it would be more accurate to call the so-called process of “selection” natural preservation. I’d suggest “natural happenstance” myself because if variation and the environment come about “randomly” then despite the tendency of modern Darwinists to argue that “natural selection” isn’t a random process that doesn’t really matter given that it’s filtering through “random” mutations that come about by chance in an environment ultimately created by chance.
Ironically the notion of chance is a science/knowledge stopper, it is an argument which stops the study of cause and effect. A scientific view rooted in the study of cause and effect would be that chance is an illusion brought about by an absence of knowledge. Even the examples that people use to argue for the creative power of “chance” combined with a process of filtering like natural selection can be surrounded by knowledge based on an actual scientific view. For instance, some use a coin toss to illustrate the concept of chance. Yet since chance is actually just an illusion brought about by the absence of knowledge it is easy to point out that if the trajectory of the coin, its mass, the force it was flipped with, etc., was all known then “chance” disappears as one advances toward a knowledge of how the coin will come to rest. Chance is ignorance, chance is ultimately nothing, yet it’s typical for proponents of Darwinism to argue as if it something which explains all there is to know.
If our perceptual capacities are the result of variation then the real issue is not “natural selection” but what actually produces the variations and adaptations which it filters. Is your argument ultimately rooted in our perception of chance?
September 10th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
…we would have to have a way of stepping outside of ourselves, and I don’t see how that makes any sense at all.
At all? This reminds me of the “nothing but” statements typical to reductionists who tend to argue that what we tend to think we are is actually nothing but an illusion generated by natural selection operating on genes and so on. I’d argue that the view that we can’t step outside of ourselves for a transcendent view of things is generally correct, an important view, etc. The problem is adding “at all” to it.
For example, if we have no way of stepping outside of ourselves, observing ourselves, talking to ourselves and so on then why do we do such things all the time and further how would we have any knowledge of ourselves if we could not somehow get outside of ourselves enough to see ourselves? In contrast to the argument that immanence is all there it seems to me more likely that sense is in some sense always a union of transcendence and immanence in awareness:
It’s interesting how symbolism seems to be timeless. For example he argues on the one hand and then on the other while dealing with themes of transcendence and immanence. The right hand is typically symbolic of transcendence while the left is more immanent, it seems that one might even be able to extend this ancient notion to the political notion of a Left and Right. Is it symbolism or reality? Interesting to note that at some point people really do tend to sit on one side of a room or another and then tradition develops while language unfolds as labels like “right wing” apparently emerge and so on. Of course in Christianity God’s right hand man is the Christ who sits on his right and so on while those to the sinister left are sent away. Perhaps it’s little wonder that Leftists seem to fear the Christian Right so much, yet at the same time those on the Right can be blinded by righteousness. They forget that God seems to be willing to cut off his own right hand symbolically speaking. Now I am meandering because it’s a political season.